Why I Impulse Buy New Notebooks

Kimber explains a bad habit.



Every time I go to a store at which notebooks are sold, I have to make a conscious effort not to buy one. The notebooks don't even have to be pretty or original. I'm just as tempted by the crappy spiral-bound school notebooks they sell for 47 cents as I am by hand-stitched Italian leather journals that are sold for the price of a small child.

The thing is, when I get my new notebook home, I hardly ever use it, and I have yet to fill a notebook up. This seems like a terrible waste to me, yet I continue to have the urge to buy notebooks, wherever I am, and regardless of how many notebooks I've acquired in the last week.

I think this illogical desire stems from the possibility that a blank notebook holds. Before I've filled pages with shopping lists, undecipherable doodles, and resentfully taken notes, a notebook is full of promise of the great American novel, an award-winning play, or even just a comedy routine that kills. I imagine that the only reason I haven't written these things yet is that I haven't found the right sort of paper on which to put them down. I never want to acknowledge the truth that I just don't want to go the work of polishing something mediocre into something great, and I have yet to recognize that maybe I don't have anything that important to say.

So I continue to buy notebooks, because in the end, they are a far cheaper impulse buy than what it would cost me to really accept that they will never have anything meaningful written in them.